Reach potential employees with a social media recruiting campaign

Posted on Wednesday, 19th September, 2012 in Uncategorised

It wasn’t long ago marketers were making ‘acquisitions’ of customers. Now they’re ‘building communities’. At some point, every organisation needs to consider the recruitment process. How they achieve a connection with the right applicant should go beyond traditional methods of being known to each individual network organically.

These days, finding candidates using social networks like Facebook and Twitter is pretty commonplace. It’s not unusual to see a tweet in your feed with the #job hashtag followed by “PLS RT!”. But there’s a lot more to social recruiting than simply posting on your Facebook wall or Tweeting about the gap in your organisation (especially difficult when limited to 140 characters).

Social recruitment should be about driving meaningful engagement with your organisation to build industry and candidate networks. Unlike traditional ‘head hunting’, it merges the disciplines of marketing and human resources. By using a standalone website to link peer and industry networks, a unique employer brand based on useful, informative and creative content can be established. That same content can be actively placed in social networks where it is welcome.

It’s important to remember that only 10 per cent of the population is ever actively looking for work. Your challenge: to make an impression and remain top of mind, without spending a bucket on advertising and trade fairs. That’s why social media strategy is core recruiting strategy.

Here are four tips to creating an effective and engaging social recruiting campaign:

1. Research and know your target audience.
A decision is only as good as the intelligence that informs it. You need to know what your community wants to know. Probing for those little epiphanies and nuances is crucial to understanding what makes your target audience tick.

2. Understand current costs.
It is important to understand what it currently costs to hire your employee group. This includes the cost of advertising new positions, cost to hire HR staff, cost to fill roles with temp agency staff whilst you look for new talent.

3. Create an online community.
This is the fun part. You’ve done your research and collated information and now you get to put your findings to work. Bringing in new employees that share values, ambition and knowledge that reflect a company’s overall purpose. It’s about connection through personal experiences. Instead of a static approach, employers can actually engage with the right person by using rich media and current employees to tell the story.

4. Develop employer capacity.
Now that your community is up and running, it’s really important to retain maximum engagement and keep the conversation going. Teach your employees how to pool their skills and resources.

A transition is underway. From hunter to gatherer, being part of the social revolution means acknowledging the new ways people connect, and the language they use, to secure a competitive advantage and place the right people in the right jobs. By developing a social recruitment strategy, you will not only attract skilled personnel and engage present staff, but also solve critical business issues and build your employer brand. And that’s got to be good for the bottom line.

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